Monday, November 2, 2015

A few observations about Unity

I've only been at Unity Technologies for a month, and obviously I have much to learn. Here are a few things I've picked up so far:High programmer empathy, low ego developers tend to be successful here.

Interesting company attributes: Distributed, open source style development model, team oriented, high cooperation. Automated testing, good processes, build tools, etc. are very highly valued. "Elegant code" is a serious concept at Unity.

Hiring: Flexible. Unity has local offices almost everywhere, giving it great freedom in hiring.

About Me

Back in the day I worked for several years at Digital Illusions on things like the first shipping deferred shaded game ("Shrek" - 2001), software renderers, and game AI. Then, after working for Microsoft at Ensemble Studios for 5 years as engine lead on Halo Wars, I took a year off to create "crunch", an advanced DXTc texture compression library. I then worked 5 years at Valve, where I contributed to Portal 2, Dota 2, CS:GO, and the Linux versions of Valve's Source1 games. I was one of the original developers on the Steam Linux team, where I worked with a (somewhat enigmatic) multi-billionare on proving that OpenGL could still hold its own vs. Direct3D. I also started the vogl (Valve's OpenGL debugger) project from scratch, which I worked on for over a year. In my spare time I work on various open source lossless and texture compression projects: crunch, LZHAM, miniz, jpeg-compressor, and picojpeg.